"The people who want to divide, who want to distract, who want to turn people against each other, have super weapons to do so now," he continued. "Somebody looks at their phone, they assume that what they're seeing is real. I think that's why we have to take a lot more seriously this information war."
"For instance... the picture that broke everybody's heart of the so-called starving baby turned out to not be a starving child," Jones said against a backdrop of a July 2025 New York Times article on the Gaza famine showing a woman cradling an emaciated child, while Tishby nodded approvingly.
"That child had a genetic issue. It was not being starved by Israel," Jones continued. "So when you have the mainstream media that is falling for propaganda or promoting propaganda and won't apologize, and then you have this fringe media that's massively bigger, it requires a different approach to the information war."
Yes, the child—18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq—"had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development." This is known because the authors of the Times article used that exact language while issuing a correction acknowledging their omission.
As investigative journalist Ryan Grim noted on Thursday, "the baby had a genetic issue AND was being starved by Israel AND the starvation exacerbated the condition."
Starvation in Gaza is a fact acknowledged even by US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
Trump, Vance, and Huckabee are not famine experts. But the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—the UN-aided top global authority on hunger crises—officially declared a Phase 5 famine in Gaza, the most serious category of starvation, in August 2025.
The IPC lifted Gaza’s famine designation in December 2025, citing improved—but still highly restricted—access to humanitarian aid in the exclave following a nominal ceasefire agreement reached two months earlier. However, the IPC recently published an analysis showing that from mid-April to the end of June, more than 1.2 million people, or 59% of Gaza’s population, were experiencing Phase 3 (crisis) or worse levels of food insecurity. This included about 212,000 people in Phase 4 (emergency).
United Nations officials and other hunger experts started sounding the alarm on looming starvation in Gaza in the weeks after Israel began annihilating the strip in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Since then, at least 461 people in Gaza have died from malnutrition-related causes, including 157 children, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Numerous people who deny that Israeli forces have killed or wounded a quarter million Palestinians in Gaza or that Israel is committing genocide there—a conclusion reached by numerous UN officials, scholars, jurists, rights groups, and the approximately 20 nations that formally joined South Africa’s pending genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice—are the same ones who have denied not only the Gaza famine, but that anyone was ever starving there.
Many Israeli and diaspora Jewish scholars, human rights defenders, and others—including some of the world's foremost Holocaust experts—say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Tishby—a former Israeli special envoy for combating antisemitism and delegitimization of Israel—has described Palestinian solidarity activism as a “psychosis of a moral higher ground,” characterized some organizations as fundamentally interested in taking down Israel, and argued that pro-Palestinian organizations should be banned.
She and Jones have both denied the genocide and famine in Gaza, even in the face of International Criminal Court arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Last year, while the Gaza famine was still occurring, Jones apologized for aspersing "dead Gaza baby" images as a "disinformation campaign," calling his remarks "insensitive and hurtful."
“The suffering of the people of Gaza—especially the children—is not a punch line," he said. "I’m deeply sorry it came across that way. What’s happening to children in Gaza is heartbreaking."
